Purpose of Education

What has happened to our educational system? Have our standards been so systematically lowered over the years that our coddling no longer challenges its student body? We continually struggle as a society to find the medium between addressing the arising issues of the times while pushing forward into the future. In the case of higher academic education, our arising issues seem to sprout from our progressive ambition. Schools of every level, elementary to college, have taken steps to lower their expectations of students in order to create better test score ratios, or to simply pass their students onto the next grade. Education has become politics rather than learning and the actions of our learning facilities serves as proof of this. read more »

In today’s ever changing job market, it is becoming harder and harder for students to be sufficiently prepared once they graduate. Skills learned either do not apply anymore because of technology’s rapid evolution, or there are more skills to be learned that students missed out on. In an effort to move education forward in a new direction, Microsoft designed the School of The Future in Philadelphia, PA. read more »

Tuition costs in colleges continue to rise even in the midst of this disastrous recession. Colleges don’t seem to be phased by the growing number of students who are graduating from their institutions with massive loads of debt under their arms. This isn’t surprising though. Their business is much less about the transaction of knowledge and more about the accumulation of wealth and prestige. But, maybe this is too harsh of a claim. Perhaps they do aspire to bestow education unto its students. Perhaps the problem is simply the price itself. read more »

Across the pond, academies could soon become the norm. England’s education secretary Michael Gove recently offered all schools to apply for academy status in hopes to grant them more independence – and more pay. “To my mind, you can’t put a price on what teachers have done,” said Gove.

What if this were the case over here, in the United States? read more »

Keeping the integrity of the academic industry is tough business. Sure, enrollments are up 70% since the fall of 2009, but what does it mean when they aren’t sticking around to finish? As David Leonhardt points out in his recent article Students of the Great Recession, the goal of getting high enrollment numbers has become just as important as high graduation rates these days. Drop out rates have increased invariably. Is the economy to blame? Leonhardt seems to think so. “When times are tough, you are less likely to be missing out on a good $20-an-hour job by being in class,” he says.

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Attending college can be a daunting task. We may see the tuition bill and obstacles ahead of us and think, is it really worth the expense? It is a known fact that getting a college education comes at a high cost. But some pay an even higher price than others.

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Education reform has been in the throes of political campaigning for years now. As the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” processes took a toll on our nation’s public school structure in the past 8 years, the new Obama administration plans seem to be channeling the same efforts. Competition based reform has become the new go-to style in the past decade but critics have argued that another 3 years of the same kind of education improvement won’t get us anywhere. In fact, it could end up damaging our schools even more.

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